What Reichardt is so good at is suggesting the long, slow nightmarish fallout of their eco-terrorist operation, the "denial" phase, the all-important aftermath in which it is vitally important that they go back to work on Monday morning, pretend to others and even somehow to themselves that nothing has happened. In many ways, it feels like Reichardt's limpid film Old Joy from 2006, about two friends taking a hike in Oregon's Cascade mountains. The emotional tensions are there, but submerged. The film does not have the conventional narrative beats of a thriller, but neither does it obviously signpost the plot points of another, more interior sort of drama: the story of the activists' apparent love triangle. This is not like The Dam Busters and neither is it like The Battle of Algiers.
They plan to sail up to the dam wall in the dead of night one weekend, set the timer, and paddle away very quickly indeed in a canoe. Rich-kid Dena's family is bankrolling the operation she pays for the 1,500lb of ammonium-based fertiliser needed for the explosives and puts up $10,000 (£6,000) in untraceable cash to buy a cruiser, which they will turn into a huge floating bomb. As Josh puts it, the dam is there "killing all the salmon, so you can run your iPod every second of your life". His character is another way in which this feels interestingly like a revival of American indie cinema of the 70s.Įnraged by the futile rhetoric of conventional environmental activism, they plan direct action: to blow up a hydro-electric dam, which is destroying wildlife. Josh lives and works at a co-operative farm Dena is his close friend – there may be a romantic entanglement between them – and Harmon is a slightly freaky ex-Marine of Josh's acquaintance, with long hair, radical views and some rather picturesque vocab: he says "split" instead of "leave". Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard play a trio of environmental activists: Josh, Dena and Harmon, respectively. And yet the film is gripping and disturbing. There can't be many screen dramas in which a climactic fight between characters is accompanied with quiet, plangent pan-pipe music on the soundtrack, the sort that one generally hears in the reception at a hotel spa.
#Night moves film 2013 movie#
This Night Moves is like a suspense movie held in suspense: a thriller that behaves as if it is a gentle, indie-arthouse film concerned only with evoking the static beauty of nature. There are traces of noir here, too, but distinctively mixed with something calmer, blanker, less obviously flavoured with genre.
The title of Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves has a ghostly echo of Arthur Penn's 1975 noir of the same name, which featured Gene Hackman as the private detective hunting a missing woman, and getting into a watery nightmare.
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